


Postmortem

by mirawonderfulstar



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Feelings Realization, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 10:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21444832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirawonderfulstar/pseuds/mirawonderfulstar
Summary: After the precursors gain full control of Newt, somebody has to go through his possessions, and Hermann refuses to allow anybody else to do it.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	Postmortem

Hermann had volunteered-- well, more like demanded that he be the one to clean out Newt’s lab and office space. He had the clearance, after all, and he was one of maybe three people in the world who actually understood Newt’s work, but apart from that, he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of it being someone else. 

It was the way the others were all talking about him. Lambert and Shao and all the rest of them, talking about Newt and Newt’s space and Newt’s possessions like he was dead, like he was gone for good, like he wasn’t locked up in a cell and trapped in his mind by forces he had no control over. Newt was  _ right there _ , so close after so long, and yet he wasn’t, and Hermann didn’t know what to do other than keep reminding everyone of this fact and forcing them all to take seriously the idea that Newton Geiszler was worth saving. And if that meant going through his entire mess of a lab personally and devising some kind of plan to save him himself, so be it.

Except Newt’s lab hadn’t been a mess. Hermann had found everything neat, clean and orderly, and the absence of Newt’s characteristic chaos had disheartened him just a little even as he thought it might be easier to look at everything this way. Newt or the precursors or both had left some kind of filing system and while it allowed Hermann to sift through the last decade of research with greater ease it didn’t make him feel better at all. 

Nor did the contents of the research. Hermann’s hope had been that getting a good look at everything Newt had been doing would help him get him back, somehow, and after nearly a month Hermann didn’t think he was any further along than he had been when he’d first gone down to see Newt and Newt had laughed in his face. There was nothing here that would be of any use in getting Newt disconnected from the precursors, nothing about drift technology or the hivemind or even (and Hermann hated himself for being so sentimental as to actually think this would help) anything personal of Newt’s cataloguing his work. 

But maybe such a thing would be in his office, Hermann thought. Maybe the breakthrough he was so desperately searching for was there, or in Newt’s apartment. And so he moved on from the lab to the office after another month, and then from the office to the apartment six weeks later, and still he found nothing. There just wasn’t anything that Newt had saved, either as part of his work or as part of his personal life, that Hermann recognized as belonging to the Newton Geiszler he'd known.

Newt as Hermann had known him seemed to be gone, scrubbed so thoroughly from existence that at times Hermann wondered desperately if the others were right, if Newt might as well be dead. It was at times like this that he usually found himself going back to see him again, looking for reassurance and finding none. 

He talked to Newt anyway, some bitter little remnant of his heart hoping against hope that something, anything he might say might jog Newt back to control of himself, but the precursors showed no signs of ever tiring or letting him go. They mocked him, and Hermann did his best not to listen, because that wasn’t Newt and they knew Newt well enough to know what would hurt him. They were exploiting a weakness, nothing more. 

Three months into going through the contents of Newt’s life and Hermann had all but given up hope on finding something useful, had all but resigned himself to his next course of action, which was to start tracking down experts in drift technology and getting their input on the situation. And then he found the recorder. 

Hermann recognized it, was the truly incredible thing. It was the same battered old pocket recorder Newt had used when they’d worked in Hong Kong together, when he’d frequently been up to his armpits in kaiju specimens and started keeping the recorder because Hermann had yelled at him one day that he wasn’t his bloody assistant and wasn’t going to write “just one more thing down for me, Herm, please, I’m covered in stomach acid here”. The ghost of a smile twitched over Hermann’s lips as he turned the object, plucked out of a drawer in the bedroom and evidently long forgotten about, over and over in his hands. 

It was purely nostalgia that caused Hermann to pop it into the USB on the computer he brought to document anything relevant, nostalgia and a bit of longing. He’d been such a goddamn fool, Hermann thought, listening to Newt babble on about toxicity and blood and kidneys. Every once in a while Hermann could hear his own voice, an unintelligible murmur in the background, and the dull ache of grief, of loss, of bitterness for what he’d had in his relationship with Newt and taken for granted was matched only by the desperate fondness he felt, the  _ love _ , Hermann realized with a force that knocked the air out of him. 

For several moments the sound of the recording faded to static in Hermann’s mind as he grappled with the ramifications of the thought he’d just had. He’d loved Newt once, and could again, if they ever got the chance, and oh, Hermann wanted that chance. Hermann would fight for that chance any way he knew how, would speak to every drift expert on the planet, become one himself if he needed to, anything,  _ anything _ to get Newt back safely and allow them the chance they’d passed up ten years ago. Whatever had gone wrong after they’d closed the breach, Hermann would right it, because his world had been better, for all the mess and the fuss and the bloody war in the background, with Newton Geiszler in it than in any of the intervening years. Whatever the precursors said to the contrary, Hermann had never wanted to overlook Newt, to leave him alone.

Hermann came back to the present to find the recorder was nearing the end of its playback. He blinked, momentarily disoriented by the sudden changes in the recording-- Newt was speaking faster, and there was rather a lot of loud metal-on-metal background noise, like he was carrying the recorder as he hauled machinery around rather than letting it sit on the edge of the desk as he yelled findings into it. “Chances are, the segment’s far too damaged to drift with--” Oh. This was the drift. Hermann’s stomach turned over. _This was the drift_.

He wanted to turn the recorder off. He didn’t want to hear this, this moment when Newt made a decision which would send him down a path that would mar the next ten years of his life and leave him chained to a chair in a shatterdome holding cell. 

But as Hermann made to turn the recorder off, Newt addressed him by name. 

“--if you’re listening to this, well I’m either alive, and I’ve proven what I’ve just done works-- in which case haha I won-- or I’m dead,” Hermann’s heart clenched, “and I’d like you to know that it’s all your fault, you know, it really is, you drove me to this, in which case ha I also won.” 

Several more seconds of Newt’s rambling speech followed this before the recorder clicked off, but Hermann didn’t hear them. There was a ringing in his ears drowning out everything else, and a pounding in his head that might have been his own heartbeat, and a wave of nausea washing over him, chasing the guilt and horror and grief up his throat. 

Hermann closed his eyes, swallowed, stood, and made it to the bathroom of Newt’s apartment just in time to vomit into the toilet. 


End file.
